


don’t worry, it’s my blood

by MymbleHowl



Series: spilt sunshine [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Eventual Smut, F/M, Flatmates to Lovers to Complicated, Jon wants to save the world, Lycra, Modern AU, Sansa thinks too much, They’re not related, and instead i kinda doubled the starks up, weird sexposition
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:53:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26257447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MymbleHowl/pseuds/MymbleHowl
Summary: Grown ups shouldn’t fall in love with their 23 year old flatmates.Westminster Press Officers shouldn’t fall into the arms of Protestors.Cool collected women should stay away from furious young men.Whatever Jon’s involved in Sansa shouldn’t give up her job, everything she has ever worked for, to save him, should she?
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Series: spilt sunshine [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1920478
Comments: 12
Kudos: 68





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I love the idea of Jon as a Climate Change protestor, it seems so close to canon (at least show canon, although, if only the solution to Climate Change was as simple as one young woman parkouring out of a tree and sticking the big bad with pointy end).
> 
> I like the idea of Sansa being older, I think she’s the more grown up of the 2 of them.
> 
> This is a political thriller I suppose, but one where I’m more interested in their feelings than plot and the pacing is all over the place. Oops.
> 
> There is a reference to police brutality in this prologue.

Prologue

2010

Baelish looked thrilled when he came out the committee room despite the grilling Chilcot had given him, despite the fact that his testimony was already being discussed on rolling news coverage. Sansa briskly kept pace with him, because that’s what you did in these corridors, you flew along them with whispered secrets and grasped sheaths of information.

“Chaos is a ladder for people like us to climb, Sansa,” he said to her.

2019

She follows him into the little security room behind the reception desk. The video he plays is silent and dark. A boy smashes a window, at least Sansa thinks it is a boy. A police officer tries to contain this boy, he struggles free. Other things must be happening on other cameras she thinks, there is a bigger picture here. The police officer pulls out his baton and slams it into the boy, who staggers. It should be enough, it is enough, but the officer hits him again and again, until the boy is on the ground, kneels on the boy’s chest. Then there is man there. A man who Sansa knows. A man who Sansa thinks of as a boy. A man who has somehow picked the police officer up off the boy. A man who has been swarmed by 3 more police. A man who has let go of the police officer. A man who stands there cuffed and furiously frowning, who is looking up through the security camera, through the computer screen and into her soul.

“Are you sleeping with him?” Baelish asks, conversationally, “that’s assault of a police officer, with his previous, that’s five years, easily. It’s going to debunk the whole peaceful protesters who resist calmly and smile, the convictions here.” He looks at her, “I don’t think we want the CPS to use this, though, this might confuse a jury, and there’s some really clear body cam footage, which captures his aggression, I believe.”

She watches the video again as Baelish takes a call and Jon’s eyes stare up at her again as she flicks her eyes to her boss, caught up in his next secret.

She isn’t sure whether it’s by Baelish’s design or simply his underestimation of her but Sansa can feel her fingers slipping on the ladder, her body slipping into the chaos for others to climb up. She chooses the chaos.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chilcot lead the Iraq war enquiry.
> 
> The CPS is the Crown Prosecution Service


	2. August 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the summary implies Sansa is pretty cool, collected and detached, but she seems pretty flustered here [frowns to self à la Jon Snow].
> 
> I know very little about Hydroponics or Wakefield and probably some other stuff mentioned here, so, sorry for misrepresentations etc. I do have some experience of original parquet floors.

“I’m Jon,” says the man on the doorstep, “Jon Snow, Arya’s friend.”

Sansa has to wonder if she’s looked at him too long, and that’s why he’s added all the qualifiers, because she knew it would be him before she opened the door, they’d agreed he’d come for 1pm. He is the kind of person you look at though, he has a kind of asymmetric beauty that is intriguing. Is he very young she wonders, but she can’t tell because of the beard and the frown.

“Come in, I’m Sansa,” she says.

“Where should I leave this?” he asks as he is taking off his shoes and she realises he is carrying a folded bike. He looks worriedly at her parquet floor.

“Oh anywhere,” she says surprising herself, “it’s almost 100 years old, I’m sure it’s survived worse than a Brompton.”

Ridiculously she hopes it is a Brompton, as if being unable to identify a folding bike brand would be a massive faux pas. She doesn’t know where this carefree person has emerged from, she was always chiding Arya when she lived here about treating the parquet with care, she herself tiptoes in stilettos on it.

They walk through the flat, “this would be your bedroom,” she says.

It has a pale green wallpaper with a subtle floral pattern and an original wrought iron fireplace painted cream. She can’t work out whether he looks perfect against it with his Byronic curls, his pretty lips, or entirely at odds to it with his broad shoulders in an over washed t-shirt, his hands in fists. Then she realises she is looking too long again. He has looked round the room very quickly and is now looking at her and waiting politely.

“I’d clear the books,” she says, “or I could clear the furniture, if you...”

“No, it’s fine, I don’t really have anything,” he replies, “bed, desk, chair, I’m good” he adds gesturing to the furniture.

The bed is a vintage metal thing, that Sansa found in an antiques warehouse out by Margaery, and which she now realises will probably creak every time he moves in it. She can’t help herself, she starts imagining what might happen if he brought a girl into the bed. Maybe he likes boys she thinks, as if that has any relevance. Apparently she is unable to control her thoughts in his presence. She worries the table is more of a console table than a desk but she doesn’t say anything. She looks at him, he is waiting politely again.

They have tea, he chooses chamomile, which makes her want to make a joke, about calming him down, he is so still, so meek. In fact he might be a seething storm of emotion, but she can’t tell because she won’t let herself to look into his eyes for long enough to find out.

“Lived here long?” he asks her.

“Almost 10 years”

“Oh,” he says with slight surprise.

“You’re doing a PhD?” she says brightly in the way she talks to her Uncle Edmure’s kids about their A’level choices.

“Yes,” he frowns at her, “Umm, my supervisor is moving to Imperial, he got the chair in Plant Sciences and he wanted me to go with him.”

“So its a PhD in Plant Sciences?”

“I guess it’s molecular plant biology and biodiversity, it’s about simulating biodiversity in hydroponic systems, particularly for use in urban areas.”

“Oh,” she says.

“It’s funded as a climate crisis salve but we’ll probably all be dead before anything could be usable at this rate.”

She dares to look into his eyes at this stark warning, she sees the whirl of emotion, though his face looks composed, his frown is curiously less pronounced than when she asked about the PhD.

“You work for the government?” he asks.

“Yeah, I’m a civil servant, you know like in ‘The Thick of It’”

He just looks really confused, “in the thick of it?” he says.

“My job is like the comedy programme ‘The Thick of It.’”

“Oh,” he is so polite he says no more and she realises she has deflected talking about the department she actually works for. She thinks Arya is probably evasive if people ask, maybe it ruins her street cred.

“Are you from Yorkshire?” she asks.

“Aye, Wakefield.” His accent gets stronger, growlier, as he says Wakefield.

“My dad’s from Yorkshire. Was from Yorkshire,” she corrects.

“I know, me and Arya looked it up once, he was from the East Riding.” He says East Riding as if it’s the other side of the moon, not just the bit of the county East of Leeds.

“Your accent’s still similar.”

He makes a noise which might be a disagreement.

“So, what are you thinking about the room?” she asks.

“I’d like it, if that’s ok with you?”

She nods, “Of course.”

“Aren’t you undercharging?” he asks.

“No, this is actually better in terms of HMRC declarations, it’s just simpler to keep you in the lodger bracket, I can still get you a lease agreement, if you want?”

“I’m sure you’re busy, it’s fine, I trust you,” he offers.

She hopes the glow his trust has given her doesn’t show as a blush on her skin, imagine giving trust so freely. Sometimes she trusts Arya, but not always, not to understand her experiences. Sometimes she trusts Margaery, but not with her feelings, Margaery would have everything sharp and difficult turn to lemonade, no everything turn to Veuve Clicquot Rosé. Sometimes she trusts Brienne, she pays her enough. She trusts herself but only if she can make herself as chill and polished as marble.

She hasn’t trusted a man since her father died, she looks at Jon Snow, into the dark of his eyes, and cannot judge whether he is trustworthy or not. How could she know, it’s impossible to know anyone is trustworthy, she thinks.

When he leaves he says, “can I leave the bike? It’s just I want to bring my road bike as well.”

“Okay.” She looks at the folded bike on her original parquet floor.

“I’ll put it in the bedroom?” he suggests with another crease of his forehead.

“Yes please.”

* * *

“Snow is an unusual surname,” says Margaery.

“His Nanna was a hippy,” supplies Sansa.

“What?” Margaery almost squeals. There is a lull between Margaery’s toddler screaming (“If only the au pair didn’t have the right to a day off”) and Margaery’s baby screaming (“Why aren’t wetnurses still a thing?”)

“His Nanna was a hippy and she changed her name to Rain Snow, so his mum was a Snow and he’s a Snow.”

“But if his Grandmother was a hippy he must be so young, I mean, my mum was a hippy, well kind of.”

Margaery’s mother is the kind of person for whom a great day out is spending 2 grand in Harvey Nicks and then having a Champagne afternoon tea, so Sansa thinks any hippy-ish qualities she had must have been pure style.

“He’s 23.” Sansa has found this out from Arya.

Margaery’s eyes are alight and her hand is at her mouth, “He’s 23 and he’s a beautiful, muscled? toned? hipster, we have to find him” she has out her phone and is searching for him.

“He’s not a hipster, maybe his hair is a bit hipster, but he was dressed more utilitarian, plus I think he’s pretty climate aware.”

“He’s woke too.” Margaery’s pitch is ascending, “I can’t find him, you look.”

They don’t find him, they only find an article from Manchester University alumni magazine which he has written about how skyscrapers of the future will be drenched in plants which makes him seem both incredibly optimistic, who will pay for it Sansa wonders, and pessimistic, temperatures could apparently be unbearable in a lot of the world’s major cities within 20 years.

“Why do you need a lodger?” says Margaery.

“I don’t, I’m helping out a friend of my sister’s, that’s all.”


	3. November 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a German bike brand called GHOST, so obviously...
> 
> Warnings for a reference to suicide (sorry, both of them have anguished backstories here).
> 
> Also there is a traumatic parentage reveal, and drunk angry cycling (he’s fine, he’s stupid).

Jon likes the rules, the rules are easy to see in Sansa’s flat. He always keeps everything tidy. He doesn’t speak to her beyond saying morning if he needs to leave around the same time as her. He dusts and hoovers and she cleans the bathroom and kitchen on Saturday mornings. Unless he has a timepoint in an experiment but she’s fine about that, she just says I used to do it all by myself.

He’s just not sure about the rules for having people to the flat, Sansa spends her social time going out to brunch or coffee with a roll call of women who seem to mainly have pretty names and children.

Val comes anyway, she walks home with him after the Islington Extinction Rebellion meeting, he has to push his bike. She’s still talking when they reach the door to Sansa’s mansion block and the simplest thing seems to be to invite her up.

They are sitting at the kitchen table drinking their third beers when Sansa comes home.

“Hi, I’m Sansa,” she says with a gracious smile, a proffered hand.

“Val” says Val, toning down her natural fizz for some reason.

“I hope you don’t...” Jon starts to say.

“You’re allowed people here, Jon,” says Sansa, “But, I’m just going to change out my work clothes, excuse me.”

Jon watches the flick of her ponytail as she leaves, like a fox tail. Then he sees that Val is looking him with an odd appraising look, she raises her eyebrows briefly, for some reason the look reminds him of Dany. A second later he realises he is biting his tongue, he feels the bubble of everything and he pushes it back down, swallows it.

“She’s very elegant,” Val is whispering, as if elegant is not always a compliment, and it reminds Jon of how Gendry had said Sansa was very nice. Arya, Jon remembers was unhelpful, and had only offered that her sister was “your standard Home Counties private schoolgirl,” which meant nothing to Jon.

“We should get something to eat,” Val says, “I don’t want to get Jon Snow drunk.”

Jon ignores the ghosts of the other people who used to call him by his name like that, “I could cook something,” he offers, he thinks he could cook for Sansa too, he hasn’t done that. Sometimes on Sundays she bakes cakes that he tries and once they ordered Vietnamese together, but that’s it.

Sansa returns, and Jon looks at her, she isn’t elegant, she is simply beautiful, like one of those women with red hair in the romantic paintings but standing in a little London kitchen. He knows those paintings have a special name.

“I’m going to get myself some supper,” she says ”if that’s ok?”

Val says cheerily, “Jon’s gonna cook.”

“Aye, for everyone, if you like?” He gets up as he says it, as if his action will persuade her, “happen, you could have a drink, if you wanted.”

“Maybe I could have a drink, do you want anything?” she asks them, Val just shakes her head and her full beer bottle, he shakes his head. Sansa starts making a gin and tonic and Jon doesn’t get out any food, he simply watches her, she pours the gin with a metal measure, she adds ice, she peels a flick of orange zest and twists it, she adds the tonic, she only has a sip before everything is tidied, swiftly. Then she sits. She looks at Jon with wide expectant eyes, “What are you cooking?” she asks.

“Puttanesca? And salad?” He offers tentatively.

“Sounds good. Do you need any help?”

But he shakes his head, he sends them both away to the living room, where he won’t feel their eyes on him.

The meal is fine, Sansa asks Val a lot about her job. Val works for a housing association, which specialises in housing the long term homeless and Val is very forthright about everything. Jon has noticed this before, how Val can get into arguments and push forward ideas as if the whole thing is just an enthusiastic game. He can see Sansa and Val don’t quite agree but it slips off both of them, because Sansa is detached, because Val is assured. He knows he won’t learn either of their tricks, that when he gives his views he just descends into frustration, his heart burning, his shoulders tense or worse.

There isn’t any pudding, Sansa offers ice cream but Val doesn’t eat cows milk.

“Sorry, are you allergic? or vegan?” Sansa asks her.

“Val eats squirrel,” Jon offers.

“Well the grey ones are disrupting the ecosystem,” Val claims.

Sansa laughs, she is looking at them unsure if they are joking.

“Milk is just really problematic,” Val continues.

“I mainly drink almond milk now,” says Sansa.

Val pushes her lips together, not really trying to be polite and Sansa looks at each of them, questioning.

“The thing is, all large scale food production is problematic, cos of its environmental impact and its ethical impact, I mean we don’t know the tomatoes in the pasta sauce weren’t picked by trafficked people, for example, the system is knackered,” Jon offers as an explanation.

“There’s too much focus on replacing products people are familiar with, with meat free versions etc., and almond production uses a shit-ton of water,” says Val.

He doesn’t bother to argue with her, “being aware of a product’s environmental impact is important, I guess,” he says quietly, mimicking the little voice in his head with which he tries to tell himself he’s trying his best.

Val loads the dishwasher and laughs at Jon’s idea she might need accompanying home, “make her another gin,” she whispers, as she leaves.

He doesn’t make her another gin, he knows she gets up at 6am to leave at 7:15. He sends her to her bedroom with a cup of tea, and thinks briefly about her dusky pink bedding that compliments her hair as he tidies the kitchen.

* * *

The gin happens on a Friday, he’s in the middle of experiment with 12 hourly timepoints, he cycles home after the 8pm one. Sansa is in the living room watching something.

“I’m eating the problematic ice cream,” she says with a smile and a wave of her spoon.

“Aye,” he says as he walks past, careful about the clarty splatters on his legs. In the shower he resolves to offer her a drink. He’s never sure if her unknowableness is some personal protective lacquer or just all the differences between them. He lists them as the hot water runs over him, class, age, job, priorities, actually he’s not sure what her priorities are. He just wishes she wasn’t unknowable.

It’s 3 gins in before he talks about the paintings. He’s drunk the gin too, it tastes like medicine.

“You know those paintings?” he says, they are both sitting on the sofa, but facing each other, their backs to the arms, he leans towards her, almost touches her hair.

“Which paintings?”

“The ones where the women look like you.” He knows he is frowning, “they’re Victorian?”

“Are you trying to compare me to a Pre-Raphelite muse?” She laughs,

“Pre-Raphelite!” He is aware his volume is too much, he taps himself reflexively, stay quiet.

“I think I’m a little too old and I should probably have died of consumption or a laudanum overdose already,” she is still laughing, “anyway my hair isn’t nearly effervescent enough, it would need to be beautiful buoyant waves, like your friend Val’s.”

“Val’s blonde,” he says, confused.

“She has that mermaid hair though,” Sansa says with wide eyes, “I bet Holman Hunt would have loved her, she’d be perfect in some pastoral idyll,” she sucks in air dramatically, “you could be a shepherd, not tending your sheep, distracted by her beauty, I think they’d like your hair too, they must have been hair fetishists.”

“But they mainly painted redheads?” he checks.

“The redheads tend to be mainly sad and alone, I mean Ophelia’s drowning,” she is still laughing, but there is an edge now. He tries to stop thinking about the paintings.

It’s the fifth gin when she talks about her father. She is all glowing about him, how he was the one who let Arya go to state school, how he stood up for what he believed in even though he lost his job, how proud he was about her getting into Balliol.

“What’s Oxford like?” he wants to deflect away from fathers somehow.

“Well, it was a long time ago, and” she pauses, “Well, lots of stuff was happening around then, it’s difficult for me to unpick it.”

It’s clear Oxford is closed, she looks at him, her eyes like fine china, glossy and hard.

“What about you? Your uncle sounds nice.”

“Aye” he thinks he nods but time is being stretched by the gin.

“He’s not a Snow, though?” She asks.

“No, he avoided that, he’s a Dayne, Arthur Dayne.” He knows she is stepping carefully.

“It must have been hard, just you and him.”

He thinks he makes a sound. It wasn’t hard though, not really. He never had anything like the time Theon had to go into emergency foster care because his mum had been sectioned, and Asha had had to take him on the bus to A and E because Theon’s dad had clocked Theon on the jaw so hard that every five minutes he kept saying “I feel like I’ve just woken up.”

He looks at Sansa, she is soft concern, leaning towards him. He’s not sure if he told the story about Theon out loud.

“It’s not like 2 whole parents always works out that well.” He definitely says that out loud as he stands up.

“Jon,” she says, she is stepping towards him, reaching toward him.

He is thinking about Robb. He is thinking about Robb’s mum at the funeral, Robb’s dad’s funeral, he is thinking about how she pulled him aside, hissed “you know he was your father, right?” He knows her pain built her spite.

“I can’t,” he says. He doesn’t know what he means.

He is not thinking about his mother, rejected and unchosen, waiting on the platform for the thunder of the Leeds express train. He is not thinking about that.

He is shoving on his cleats even though he is wearing jeans, even though it’s raining and the middle of a November night. He lifts the GHOST out of his room, he probably catches the wall with a pedal. He doesn’t know how many times Sansa says his name.

“I’ve got a timepoint, it’s fine,” he claims as he goes out the door.

It isn’t fine. The rain is the only thing that keeps him from the burning that beats inside him.

He sits in the lab. There is an email from Sansa, “please message me, you forgot your phone.” He replies, “I’m here, safe. Sorry about earlier.”

He thinks about Robb. He thinks Sansa would walk past Robb so briskly, eyes averted, while she sits on sofas happily with Jon, offers him tea and biscuits. I’m here safe, he reminds himself.

He still exists, the burning is less, he runs analysis that could have waited until Monday, he reads a paper in _Science_ , at 8am he takes samples like he is supposed to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can explain the doubled up Starks if anyone would like, but I’m not sure anyone is interested, I think this story is mainly about me vicariously being in London.
> 
> Maybe I’ll also get some vicarious reckless joy in the next chapter (due to my own stupid fault this comes with several helpings of angst).


	4. December 2018

Jon is standing in the hallway, still in his Lycra, tendrils of curls pulling free from his bun, his eyes aflame, she thinks he might be counting. Sansa twists the button at the top of her coat. His top, she realises is slightly sheer and everything clings to him, line of his muscles clear.

“Jon,” she says softly, she doesn’t want to scare him off into the night again. She doesn’t want the waiting, the waves of nausea, which might have been the gin of course.

He seems so dangerous and young like this. But this fury doesn’t make her afraid, somehow she wants it for herself.

She steps to him. She is taller than him in her heels. She means to tell him it’s ok, it’s ok to be angry. That’s what Brienne would say to her, feel your anger, stay with it.

He hasn’t looked at her still. She touches his fist gently. After a second he looks at her.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

“No,” he says quietly.

She stands and waits with her hand on his. He smells of sweat and car fumes. She tries to count now, feels the pulsing of her heartbeat counting out the seconds, eventually he looks at her again and she knows he’s here, here with her in her neat hallway.

Then she kisses him. Even though she’s forgotten how to kiss. He kisses her, keeps kissing her until she thinks she’s remembered how to kiss but forgotten how to breathe.

“Is this ok?” she asks him, he nods as he kisses her again. She still has her hand on his, she is steadying herself against him with her other hand, gripping his upper arm.

She takes his hand to her coat buttons.

“Undo it,” she whispers, then she is kissing his earlobe, his neck. She slinks as his hands come underneath the coat and it falls to the floor. Now he is holding her ribs. Even as she breathes against his thumbs, she is thinking I was supposed to put a wash on, but she doesn’t stop kissing him, pressing her whole body into him. She tilts her hips to his, even as she is worrying about the effect the fumes she can taste on his skin have on his lungs, even as her lip fizzles against the scratch his beard.

Now he is moving her so he is pressed against her, so she is pressed against her front door. Her skin is dancing, not so much with his touch but with all the places he hasn’t touched yet, hasn’t kissed yet. His palm is firm on her back, guiding her, pulling them together. She is reeling against his hips, his hand, as she kisses the corner of his mouth, captures his lip between hers, let’s her teeth rasp against it. 

The pull of all the demanding, scurrying beetles of government, each convinced of their own importance, own precedence is unraveling. Because. Because he is slipping down her trousers, finger tips against her thighs, slipping down her body, kissing down her collar bone, kissing down the placket of her shirt. Her day is unraveling, weightless, almost forgotten as her desire is spinning, twisting into a bright shining thread.

He lifts her foot out of her shoe, pulls off one trouser leg then the other, kisses her thighs, winkles her out of her knickers almost as elegantly as he has slipped off her trousers.

“Sorry,” she whispers about the crown of hair he has revealed, he just frowns at her in confusion and she is not tempted to explain, not when he is kissing her thighs, no soft crackles any longer, firm burning kisses, that make her tilt her crotch towards his tongue, his lips.

And then she is fucking his tongue. And he is slinking his fingers around her clit. And the firm of his palm is on her back again pulling her towards his mouth. And her shoulder blades are against the cool of her front door. And any neighbour in her stairwell would hear her gasps.

She rolling on his tongue, the threads of arousal, spinning, twisting, pulling, gathering. She is looking at the pale yellow of her hall pendant lamp but she cannot steady herself against the twirling shudder of orgasm.

Eventually or too quickly, who knows, time has slid from its tethers, Jon stands and holds her, until the shudder is abated, slipped away.

She remains a limpet against him.

“Sansa I need to,” and he is stepping away as if to leave.

“Oh,” she says and she can hear her own disappointment.

“We don’t need to stop,” he says, “it’s just these,” he pulls the leggings “aren’t meant for this.”

“Can’t I?” she moves forward, she puts her fingers under the straps, pulls them off his shoulders.

“I have to,” he is saying, pulling the leggings away from his crotch and then she realises, they have gripped his cock in place in spite of his arousal.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

“It’s ok, it’s probably a fetish for some people,” he laughs.

She kneels to roll them down, to kiss the ripples of his thighs, there feels something taboo to peeling off the Lycra that pulses on the edge of her skin. When the leggings are off she puts her mouth on his cock. She thinks briefly of Harry but the thought is made ash by the desire she has to consume Jon. She lets the wet of her tongue, her bottom lip, drag against the tip and she is surprised at the pull in her own crotch. She is a vampire licking up his anger, his heat. Jon’s breathing is audible, unsteady, until he touches her forehead lightly, gestures her up.

“I want to,” he says, “be inside you. Can we do that?”

She nods. He pulls her into his room, rolls on the condom, tries to pull her to the bed.

“We’ll break that bed,” she says.

He looks at her confused, but she just pulls him into her own bedroom. There is an awkward moment about how. Then he says “this way” and sits in the middle of the bed against the headboard and she finds she has climbed over him and sunk onto him and she is kissing him again.

“Take off your bra,” he says.

He is pushing into her slowly. There is a roll of waves in her, syncing with his movement. She starts undoing the shirt.

He puts out his hand to stop her “No keep your shirt on, and pull the bra out?”

She holds her wrists to him, so he can undo the jet button of her sleeves, she unlatches the bra, and slithers out of the straps, he is looking at her nipples, pert through the fabric, he kisses one, then the other, now the fabric is see through, crumpled to her by his teeth. And all the while, he is pushing into her, she is gripping him steady. She feels like an empress, powerful and glorious.

He has his hands on her waist, when she falls again into that dizzying shudder of orgasm. She is looking into his eyes. He is without the frantic flicker she often finds there, he is steady somehow.

She doesn’t collapse on him in the aftermath, she keeps rolling on his cock, as she had on his tongue, the threads of arousal are still twisting, pulling her along with them, but then he comes, frowning, eyes closed.

They fall into the bed, legs entangled, but bodies separate.

Eventually, he says “So I need a shower, but maybe you want one first?”

She shrugs placidly in response, then realises he is waiting.

“Go, have your shower,” she says.

After the showers they have tea and toast.

“You know how some people,” he says, quietly, “feel they need a psychological connection to fancy someone?”

“I maybe read an article about it,” she agrees.

“I think I’m like that,” he is frowning but his eyes are still steady.

“Jon,” she says and she is trying to find her cool, marble self as she speaks, “I like you too.” 

She doesn’t explain she hasn’t had sex in almost 8 years, until just now, she doesn’t say she has trusted him with her self, her warm, velvet self.

She’s not an empress or a vampire, she’s a statue.

“There’s just a lot to think about here,” she says putting her hand over his, “I shouldn’t have kissed you, when you were in that place, probably.”

His eyes are less steady.

She should say she can’t fuck his fury away but she doesn’t say that. She doesn’t even say I’m too old for you. She says “we need to sleep on it, discuss it tomorrow.”

A vampire would ask him to sleep in her bed, so she could curl up, drink in his warmth and strength, but Sansa is a statue.


	5. February 2019

Arya sits on the sofa, half turned towards him, Jon can feel the cushions bounce as she speaks. Sansa is getting more crisps, or olives, some hostess duty. It’s almost relieving, not being in the the room with her, not having to watch the breath she takes before she replies to Arya sometimes, not having to notice the lack of touching. Now, there are no feet in his lap, no hands in his hair, no head on his shoulder, not even any brushed fingers. He tries to smooth out his frown as he thinks of Sansa asking if they could just be flat mates whilst Arya visited, how she described explaining their relationship to Arya as too much.

“So they chisel you off whatever you’ve glued yourself to, then what?” Arya asks.

“They have to pick you up, unless you agree to be arrested of course.” Jon replies.

“You resist arrest, even though you want to be arrested?” Arya clarifies.

“Aye, well you go floppy, it’s hard work for the police, but you want to engage as many people as possible and the drama and publicity to create further awareness. The people being lifted is a really great picture for the press, there’s this professor, I know from Newcastle, who’s almost 90, who was lifted at the Edinburgh protest last year, the photograph is really arresting,” Jon laughs slightly annoyed he couldn’t think of a better word, a better explanation.

“Or the Satin picture,” says Arya, excited.

“Exactly,” Jon agrees.

“What’s the Satin picture?” Sansa asks as she returns to the living room.

“So Jon’s friend, Satin, was arrested, you know where the police have to lift the person, and Satin was wearing their full Canal Street Saturday night regalia, they looked beautiful, the picture was the front page of the Metro, at least the Manchester one,” explains Arya.

“Oh, do you do that?” Sansa turns to him.

“I don’t wear my full Canal Street regalia,” he says.

She ignores this comment. “You make them have to lift you?”

“Aye.”

“But that’s wasting so much money, that money could go on something else, something you want, like repairing London’s pipes so we use water more efficiently, tree planting,” she argues, Jon can see her taking the breath that pulls her into her coolness.

“Could it, is that how government works, are you taking money from the police to plant trees?” He asks her.

“No, but,” Sansa pauses to lick her lips slightly Jon notices “you’re using up resources which could be used in communities like your own to provide important local policing.”

“Communities like my own?” Jon questions, head pounding.

“Where you grew up.”

He scoffs, “local policing, what’s that? Northern cities, Northern towns, haven’t had local policing for years, if they ever did have. Those places are already fucked in so many ways and they’ll be the places that flood, where power outages will hit first, they’ll be the people who can’t afford the rising food prices, where people’ll get ill.”

Arya is watching them like she’s at a tennis match, enthralled by the rally of their eyes.

Sansa breathes again before she speaks, “you’re catastrophising,” she says. Her face is like a porcelain doll, he thinks, perfect, unmoved.

“That’s not the half of it,” he mutters, he can hear the gravel of his own voice, rumbling, rattling, like it does against the thick tyres of a mountain bike, “and you lot faff about with Brexit and placating big business.”

“And deporting people who have the right to be here,” adds Arya brightly.

Sansa puts her hands over her face, she is not quite a porcelain doll about that.

“Love?” Jon says, then realises, but Arya has said “Sorry, I know you tried to flag that,” at the same time and doesn’t seem to have noticed.

Sansa sits down, “I don’t know how you think we can use legislation, resources, strategies, to deal with climate change if we don’t have an effective governmental system, with a stable economy, with good relations with businesses, with an effective judicial system, with the ability to reach international agreements. The whole thing has to go hand in hand, in order for anything to be achieved.”

“The governmental system isn’t achieving anything though,” he counters as quietly as he can, “so I have to fight now, whilst I might make a difference.”

* * *

He lies in his own bed, exiled. He can barely sleep. He is thinking about Sansa’s protective lacquer, how he thought he had kissed it away.

He remembers the next day, after the van driver, after the front door, after she fucked him on her pink sheets. He remembers her saying she didn’t know how to do this, meaning relationships, he supposes.

He knows he didn’t explain the van driver. The van driver who cut into the cycle lane suddenly, almost caught him, almost knocked him off his bike because some car had scraped the van’s rear light trying to squeeze past it. He had stupidly punched the van in its battered side and the driver had squared up to him. Jon knows when he caught the guy’s collar, when he said “you really want to do this,” the van driver was surprised, scared even. It is the vestiges of another person, the vestiges of his fury. But he has not explained that person, and all the things that made him, all the people who failed to make him. He has not explained that furious person to Sansa, even though she lies in his arms in her pink sheets as if he is utter safety.

Lying in his own bed he sees the gaps too in what she has told him, he knows so little of her job, he has no idea if she is responsible for deportations or police funding or prisons or whatever else might happen at the Home Office. He figures from her comment that Arya must know something more than he knows, that it is not that Sansa’s job is secret.

He knows there was a boyfriend “a long time ago,” he guesses it was in Oxford. But he realises there is more.

They have drunk coffee and held hands and leant against one another, they have kissed and fucked and been to the cinema, they have cooked breakfast on Sundays, they have walked across Hampstead Heath, they have walked through Columbia Road flower market, but they have stayed unknowable.

It scares him.

* * *

She sighs, smiles, laughs as she closes the front door after putting Arya into her taxi. Jon looks at her, all the smile gone to her eyes, as if mischief awaits. He wants to. He wants to fall to her feet now, kiss her, peel away her clothes, kiss her clit. He wants to.

Instead he stands there fists clenched, throat closing over the words he might say.

“What is it?” Sansa asks, Jon can hear the confusion there.

“I shouldn’t,” is all he manages.

“Shouldn’t what?” she asks.

But what he shouldn’t do isn’t clear anymore. He shouldn’t be so angry. He shouldn’t reveal his aggression. He shouldn’t want her. Shouldn’t have her. Shouldn’t love her. But you can’t love someone who is unknowable, who is a hard, glossy pearl.

“It’s okay,” she says, “it’s okay to be angry.”

He knows he shakes his head.

“No, everything, the world, is a mess, we’re destroying everything, there’s war, starving people and my stuff is ....” he tries to reason.

“I know,” Sansa says, she pauses, “it’s still ok to be angry.”

“You’re not.” He feels like a petulant child.

“I made myself polished, long ago,” she says.

He doesn’t say anything, he should ask why, probably, but he can’t work out if she wants to be asked or not.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I want to be angry. There was no time for being angry, at first and eventually I was polished enough and that seemed good. It was good for work,” she trails off.

He hugs her then and he is not sure if he is being held by her or the other way around.

“Let’s have a cup of tea,” she says and he follows her, everything contained more or less.

He is silent, replaying the hug, its softness, its hope, its understanding. But before he is halfway through the tea, which he has swallowed in hot gulps along with his confusion, his anger, before Sansa has sat down to her own mug, she has sat in his lap, kissed him, brought his hand under her t-shirt, to clutch at her bare breast. Surely she was wearing a bra earlier whilst she served the roast dinner, (“you traitor, there’s no Yorkshires, call this is Sunday Lunch,” Arya had declared about the lemon chicken with Ottolenghi lentils and Za’atar roasted squash). She kisses his brow, presumably to smooth out the confused furrows.

He feels the weight of her breast against his hand, as if he possesses it, digs his fingertips in, ungentle, lets his thumb scuff across her nipple. Kisses her back just once, just pressure, their lips tangled, then lifts her, stands with her, walks her to the worktop, gripping her waist. He shouldn’t be ensnared in this. He is.

He folds her over the shiny surface, holds her, his thighs pressing into the backs of her thighs, scrunches up the soft material of her skirt, grips it to drag her knickers from her, but there are no knickers either. He is not going to worship her. He isn’t.

He claps her arse, more for the sound than the impact and anyway she has fumbled in the skirt, is holding up a condom to him.

So he is straining, one handed, to pull down his jeans, put on the condom, whilst he clutches the skirt up at her waist, able to feel the bite of his nails in his palm in spite of the fabric. He holds her by the skirt, by his knees pushed between hers, he holds her, uses his grip on her skirt to pull her slightly as his fingers push apart her labia, pushes into her. He can hear how wet she is, can feel it still on his fingers, the fingers he is pushing possessively into her breasts again.

She is rocking against his pushes, rocking, he thinks, against the handle of her kitchen cupboard, her elbows braced on the worktop. He can dictate her rhythm with the fist grasping her skirt, moving them against each other. So that she almost grunts with the impact. So she is moving her hand to touch herself, with more precision, presumably, than her cupboard handle. So he is almost tipped over the edge, he recites centrifuge protocols to contain himself, and the edge slips away from him.

Now she is shaking against him, begging “harder”. Now she is biting her own arm, shimmering, coming. Finally, she has pressed herself, exhausted apparently, into her kitchen worktop.

He scoops her up, pulls her back towards him, whispers “not yet” to her, and she slips off him in response, drops the skirt entirely, perches herself on the edge of the worktop, pulls off her t-shirt too, and beckons him, naked, exposed, resplendent. He fucks her with one breast in his mouth, then the other, until he is tipped over the edge, tipped into an orgasm entirely the same as, and entirely opposite to, his fury.


	6. 8th April 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the acronyms at the beginning are just irrelevant British government departments, don't worry about them (I know a couple of people who do/did a job similar to being a Home Office Press Officer and they all love an acronym)

When Sansa walks out of work on that bright, soft Monday evening, she can’t be sure why she turns the wrong way. She knows they are on Horseferry Road, she knows the security staff are directing people this way and that to avoid the disruption. The bus stop counter shows ridiculous, unreasonable times, 34 mins wait for an every 5-8 minutes bus. People are tutting and Pod says he’s ordering an Uber from outside the HSE, which ought to be far enough up to avoid everything.

It’s lovely, a proper spill of glorious English spring sunshine cuts between the storied buildings around them. Sansa could, should, walk up to St. James’s or even walk through the parks. Instead she walks against all advice, advice she helped draft, down onto Horseferry Road.

It is a raucous celebration. It is just a curious collection of oddballs. It is a cleverly organised use of people power. It is Westminster at a standstill. No one can get out of the MHCLG or the DfT, not onto the main road at least. It stretches all the way down to Millbank. There is a heavy mix of police officers and protesters sitting in the road, woven together by arms and legs, people trying to engage with passersby, and dramatic representations, including disconcertingly a group of women 20 yds or so from Sansa dressed as if they are in an extra surreal version of _The Handmaid’s Tale_. Sansa starts to weave towards Millbank, eyes scanning for the surprising fluorescent pink band that runs across the chest of Jon’s cycling anorak.

She is a competent Londoner, she nips through the crowd efficiently, only to be caught into a 10 minute conversation with a sweet elderly woman who continually calls her darling and who was at Somerville in the 60s. Sansa has no idea how the subject of Oxford appears and for some reason she feels compelled to reassure the woman that she is not an intern but 34 and a Senior Press Officer, even though in the guidance she clearly stated to avoid giving any kind of personal details, including job titles, to the protesters.

Across the road about halfway down she sees a tell tale strip of pink on a black jacket and finds it is Jon, sitting, brooding, on the tailgate of a St. John’s Ambulance van. She gets to him, through the crowd, without him noticing her approach. Closer to she realises he has a disconcerting streak of red across his forehead, maybe it’s warpaint, but it looks like blood.

It is blood.

“What happened?” She admonishes, concerned.

“Sansa?” He says, perturbed.

“What happened?” She gestures to his forehead.

“Don’t worry, it’s my blood,” he says gruffly.

It’s an odd thing to say, don’t boyfriends like him usually say “don’t worry, it’s not my blood,” she thinks. It isn’t until hours later, recounting the day to herself that she realises she thought of him as her boyfriend at this moment.

She realises Val is standing there, has been standing there all along, speaking cheerfully to the St. John’s Ambulance medic.

“He punched a wall,” Val says almost shrugging, she sees Sansa looking at Jon’s forehead, “then I guess his hair fell in his eyes,” Val turns to him “your hair’s gonna be the death of you, King Crow,” she says.

Sansa looks down and realises Jon is holding something onto his knuckles.

“What happened?” She asks for a third time, “why did you punch a wall?”

“Why are you here?” Is his reply.

“I don’t know,” she thinks about why she turned right, why she didn’t walk to the tube, why she didn’t share Pod’s Uber, Pod lives in a share house in Finsbury Park, it would barely have been a detour for the driver. She has no answer beyond you were right here. She doesn’t say that out loud.

“He had an argument with a motorbike courier,” Val offers.

“You’re not supposed to be confrontational, it alienates people instead of raising their awareness,” says Jon, morosely.

“I have arguments with people all the time,” says Val.

“Yeah, but you...” he is clearly unable to finish the sentence without objectifying Val, so he just broods some more instead.

Val shrugs, “what? People discount my venom cos I have tits, is that what you’re trying to say, Jon Snow?”

Jon just looks uncomfortable.

Val continues “I’m perfectly able to have arguments with people who are uninterested in my appearance, and you know what, sometimes I even use my blonde innocuousness to my advantage.”

She turns to Sansa, “he got into a fight with a motorbike courier, the courier was threatening all kinds of shit, he punched a wall.” She turns back to Jon “It’s not that big a deal. Tormund completely took out a security guard at a third runway protest with the other lot, and nobody cared, Mance didn’t chuck him out, even though we’re all about non-violent rebellion.”

Jon just shakes his head at this assertion.

“Take him home,” Val says, her hand consolingly on Sansa’s arm, “kiss him better.”

There is an odd swoop in Sansa’s stomach that Val knows about her and Jon and is fine with it.

“Are you going to tell me?” Sansa asks when they are walking from Highbury and Islington back to the flat, the sun setting behind them.

“What?” Jon half grunts.

“Are you going to talk to me about what happened with the motorcycle courier?”

“Usual stuff,” Jon huffs.

“Usual stuff? Like what?”

“We asked him to turn his ignition off.”

“We?”

“Val and me, she asked him to take his helmet off.” He looks tired, “he started ranting about how they’d fine him if he were late, how we were doing proper people who actually work for a living out of a job or something. He called us fucking bastards, that kind of thing, he said he should just run us over.”

“Oh, didn’t you go to one of the Police Officers?” She asks.

“The police were right there, they wouldn’t care about a stupid threat from a courier stuck in traffic,” Jon shrugs, they walk on a bit. “He could have mounted the pavement or gone the wrong way down the street if the police hadn’t been there, to them he was behaving.”

“He didn’t understand what we were saying,” Jon continues, half to himself, “there’d be no fucking jobs if London was underwater, I told him there were millions of people barely surviving cos of the damage the climate crisis is wreaking, the stuff you call catastrophising,” he looks at her then, it feels accusatory, “I think Val was telling him not to threaten us.”

Sansa is just nodding, almost surprised at the openness.

“Then he started talking about Val, he implied," Jon takes a breath, "he'd hurt her, and worse.”

“I would have,” Jon pauses, “I almost,” he stops again, “but then the officer was looking at me and the traffic was moving on and I punched the wall,” he concludes.

“Would have what?” She asks.

“You know.”

“I don’t.” Sansa replies. Part of her does, of course, but on the other hand she repeats to herself, he doesn’t make her afraid, surely he’d make her afraid if his fury was like that?

“I would have hurt him. I could have easily...” Jon trails off but he seems resigned.

Sansa doesn’t reply, she’s almost not sure if he’s upset because he almost did hurt the guy or because he didn’t. She doesn’t ask for clarification.

Instead she says, “you should have reported him to the Police Officer.”

Jon just makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a growl. Still, she takes his bruised, grazed, hand and kisses it gently.

In the flat Sansa is thankful for the leftovers in the fridge. She is thankful for the lack of conversation whilst they eat and load the dishwasher. She is thankful that he puts his arm around her, let’s her rest her head against him on the sofa.

She takes his bloodied knuckles and kisses them very gently, kisses his wrist, kisses his forearm, twists and kisses him. Then he is kissing her, she is kissing him and it is all soft and lovely like the evening sunshine between the buildings. Through the softness, though, there is the drag of the past, there is a ghost of a kiss accepted, long ago, even with a cheek cut by that stupid ring Meryn Trant had worn.

She stops kissing Jon. She looks at him. He is looking at her, his eyes still tired.

She pushes her lips together, she wonders if it is to keep in the the things that are on the tip of her tongue.

“In Oxford,” she says “I was with a boy, we were only 18, 19, he wanted to,” she pauses trying to think of the best way to say it, “he wanted to make me feel small, he did all the things men do to make women feel small.”

Jon is looking at her, still, Sansa is sure he is trying, the best anyone can try, to be the evening sunlight, to be soft.

“Once,” she continues, “he told a guy we knew, that he should slap me for what I’d just said, and the guy did, he cut my cheek.”

“I’m sorry,” Jon says.

“It’s not yours to apologise for,” she replies, “I was just, I was thinking about it, I wanted you to know.”

It's true, she doesn't want things to be unsaid between them, hidden, she wants to be an open book, show him her torn and tattered pages.

“I stayed with him, even though he frightened me and belittled me, because he seemed like the kind of person I was supposed to be with,” she explains, “then, afterwards, when he left me, it was easiest to be as blank as possible.” 

She is looking awkwardly up at Jon, and there is his tenderness reflected at her like a balm.

“We could kiss some more, if you want,” she offers.

“Isn’t the moment kind of gone?” he asks.

“No,” Sansa says, “the moment is perfect.”

He nods slightly. Then they are kissing, twisted against each other, until they shift, until he makes her sit forward, so he can kiss the back of her neck, a nail tracing her collar bone, her jawline. He undoes the buttons at the neck of her blouse, lifts it off her, kisses along her shoulders. She is dreamy and light like a fairy on a breeze.

Up and up she is floating, as she is kissed in soft scratchy presses on her back, over their connections and disconnections, the shrugged revelation of his capacity for violence, her own unexpected openness. As she is kissed repeatedly, those connects and disconnects are just the pattern of a relationship, until he is pulling her into his chest to kiss her on the mouth, fingers roving across her skin and she is pressing her hand around his growing cock, through his jeans.

“With a condom,” he says.

“Ok,” she nods and this time her lips are pressed together to keep her own mischief in.

Whilst he is putting on the condom, she is taking off her clothes so they can fuck on her teal sofa, like a glorious spill of spring sunshine, bright and loud against the gloom of life.


	7. 9th April 2019

Jon wants to go to the Lab meeting on Tuesday so he gets up at 6:40, whilst Sansa is still in the bathroom, to make her a cup of tea and porridge. The whole morning feels bespelled, like the new leaves uncurling on the tree outside the kitchen window. He kisses her goodbye as he hands her her insulated cup filled with coffee, their fingers lagging behind, together, for a few seconds.

A couple of hours later, he coasts down Exhibition Road past the lines of day-glo jacketed children, trying to avoid breaking, the squeezing is still pretty painful on all the cuts across his knuckles. He arrives at the Lab with 20 minutes to spare.

“From the look on your face, you lot must have solved the whole fucking Climate Crisis yesterday,” claims Edd as Jon’s putting the Brompton under his desk.

Jon just shakes his head at this, but inside he can feel the tendrils and shoots of spring. He tries not to put too much hope into them, in case they wither. He’s here, he’s safe, he doesn’t need any more than that. He certainly doesn’t really need to be in the meeting since he’s essentially taken leave for the whole week and Wylla’s monitoring his long term experiments. He stays anyway, and cycles over to Whitehall at lunchtime, to find Tormund with his hand locked inside a concrete box, trying to eat the curry which is being handed out by volunteers.

“Torm, did you get the hand you do stuff with locked inside a concrete box?” Jon asks.

“Oh,” the ginger giant replies “Is that what she was talking about? She just said which hand is dominant, so I said both, if that’s what you’re into?” His accent elides half the words into each other.

In the end Jon’s good deed is spooning the curry into Tormund’s mouth like he’s a child.

“At least I don’t need a piss, eh, baby crow? That’d give you a thrill.”

Jon rolls his eyes, but this only elicits a “what the fuck are you so happy about the day?”

He goes home with Sansa again, holding her against him, for 20 mins on a commuter crowded tube. As they walk home he carries the Brompton and holds her hand, his fist still stings, the tendrils and shoots are still budding, green, thriving almost.

She makes a lemony risotto for tea, which Jon is never sure about but today everything tastes like sunlight. Afterwards, she is trying to clear the table, wash up, so he stands up and kisses her, whilst she is holding a bowl in one hand and a glass in the other. She breaks away from the kiss, but he takes the bowl and glass from her, puts them back on the table. He kisses her again, holds her, a hand between her shoulder blades, a hand on her lower back, kisses her until her hands are gripped in his hair, her self is pressed into him. 

When they stop to breathe, still pressed together she says “everything will stick.”

“I’ll scrub and scrub,” he replies.

He can walk her and kiss her into the bedroom. He kisses her neck, until her grip loosens in his hair, until she is magma, warm and viscous against him. He gathers her hair, twists it so she hums, presses her hips into him. They fall into her bed, or he pushes them into the bed, or she pulls them into it, who knows, since they are pressing and kissing as it happens.

Their kisses are half interrupted now, their bodies twisted apart, as they shimmy clothes from each other, from them selves. Then they are naked and still kissing, still pressing, even in the places they shouldn’t.

“It seems like we’re doing this without a condom?” Sansa asks.

“You have to stop when I say,” Jon replies.

“Okay,” she assents, and she is pulling herself along him, and kissing him, pressing into him. He knows at some point she lifts his uninjured hand to thumb her nipple and he instinctively grips her other breast too. Who knows where their hands are after that. It is a mess of pleasure. He’s sure she lifts off him as she comes, as if it would be too much.

“It’s so,” but his last word slides away into just a groan. She is breathing his name. He is trying protocols, he is trying formulas for diluting solutions, he is trying scientific names for uk native mosses, but everything is slipping out of his head.

“Off,” he has to command and she does pull off, although she is pouting at him.

“I’ll wash your sheets,” he tells her and she is laughing above him, her breasts are bouncing with her laughter and her hair is falling everywhere and he wants to say he loves her.

He doesn’t, instead when she has unstraddled him, he says, “I’m going to go camp tomorrow night, at the protest.”

“Where?” she asks, pulling on a t shirt, picking up their clothes, folding things.

“Well, hopefully Parliament Square, unless the police move them on again.” He takes 2 of her bedside tissues and inwardly tuts at himself.

“With Val?” she asks, but she is grinning.

He frowns at her on purpose, “Are you jealous of Val?” He’s not sure if it comes out as playfully as he intended.

“She’s so assured, she has mermaid hair, she’s like 25? And I don’t mean to objectify her but, an amazing body, even though she dresses like my mum dressed to do gardening 20 years ago. Who isn’t jealous of her?” Sansa has all her clothes either put away or over her arm for the washing basket, she hands him his jeans as a shop assistant would and walks off.

“No pot washing,” he tries to call after her.

“But you’re remaking my bed so I have time to wash up. I expect hospital corners, Jon Snow.”

“What are hospital corners?” he asks as he starts stripping the bed.

“Didn’t your,” she begins to say, but stops abruptly, “just very neat corners like nurses do.”

When the bed is made, Jon goes through to help with the washing up, although Sansa says he can’t help unless he puts underwear on.

She reads a crime book in bed and he watches downhill trail reviews and races with the sound down. He wouldn’t normally, YouTube is as bad as flying, but he misses the mud, the people, the thrill.

“That’s Arya,” Sansa exclaims, when he pauses it because he’s noticed she has put her book down.

“Aye,” he replies, and sighs, without meaning too.

“Oh?” she says and he realises she is waiting for an explanation.

“It’s just I haven’t done a trail since I moved to London,” he replies.

“You mountain bike too? How many bikes do you have?” 

“4.”

She is smiling at him, “where are the other 2?”

“Gendry’s looking after them.” He suddenly wonders what she and her sister talk about. He pushes down all the things he has failed to talk about.

“What?” she asks.

“Well, didn’t you ask Arya how she knew me?”

“She just said he goes way back with Gendry, I didn’t ask her that much, I didn’t think you’d want the room, I didn’t think I’d let you have the room.”

“Right,” he replies.

“And then you came, and you were so, not like what I expected and,” she pauses, “well maybe I don’t need a psychological connection,” she says quickly.

“What?”

“I didn’t need a psychological connection to fancy you, I guess, I thought you were, I think you are, beautiful,” she finishes with a quirk of her mouth.

Everything is green and verdant.

“I did ask her, I did ask her about you, after we met, and she said a little bit, she said you’d been through a breakup and it was good you weren’t going to be in Manchester,” she looks at him, he tries not to look down, not to swallow, he doesn’t want to think about Dany, not whilst the tendrils of spring flourish. 

Sansa is still speaking, she says, “she said you grew up with just your uncle, then she said,” she looks like she is trying recall it exactly, “his family situation is pretty complicated, but I don’t think I really have the right to explain it.”

“Aye,” he says and he knows there is almost laughter in his voice, “it’s complicated,” he feels the weight of the mattress beneath him, her clean, smooth sheets, “I told you about my mum.”

Sansa nods, patient, gentle.

“Well,” he continues, “I don’t know why she did that, but last year, I found out who my dad was and basically he got 2 women pregnant at the same time and he chose the one who wasn’t my mum.” Sansa is moving to hug him, he puts his palm up to her, “wait, I,” Jon can hear his voice shaking, he’s explained it before, but he’s never needed to explain the whole thing and now he feels like he has started in the wrong place.

He takes a breath, then another, then he says “I went to my best friend’s dad’s funeral and found out that he was my dad too, then I got told to stay away, from Robb, from him siblings,” he knows he is frowning, “my siblings.”

Sansa waits, eventually she asks, “by who?”

“Their mum, the whole thing was their mum.”

She is hugging him then and everything is still green and verdant. He doesn’t tell her anymore, he doesn’t tell her about Robb saying not to let little ones know as he gestured at his brothers and sisters. He doesn't tell her about Robb’s uncle, actually his uncle too, leading him out of the pub, saying remember 'you've still got a dad, he hasn't'. There is only the faintest whisper, right now, of being unwanted. Everything is fading away, he is just thinking about when Robb’s uncle ran scouts but Theon said scouts was for wazzocks, and then Robb stopped going.

He falls asleep holding her as if she is utter safety.

**Author's Note:**

> I made a Tumblr: [st-clements-steps](https://st-clements-steps.tumblr.com) I'm still learning Tumblr etiquette.
> 
> I've never felt very sure about this story and the way it is told in a series of snapshots. It's not been read by anyone and I feel I need to go on a beta reader finding project to write anything long. Kudos makes me smile (a lot) and comments are fabulous.


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